A tougher message from the 'march'

Marchers gathered in the nation's capital Saturday to commemorate and perhaps rekindle the goals of the historic 1963 "March on Washington" in which organizers then, among other demands, called for integrated school districts, nondiscriminatory housing policies, a massive federal jobs program and a national minimum wage of $2 ($13 in today's dollars).

It would be idiotic not to acknowledge that much has changed for the better since then. Yet, as a June 18 report by the Economic Policy Institute pointed out, "the hard economic goals of the march, critical to transforming the life opportunities of African Americans, were not fully achieved."

The EPI report, titled "The Unfinished March," noted, for example, that blacks in America today are "still in ghettos of poverty, still in segregated and unequal schools, still twice as likely to be unemployed, and still struggling for a living wage."

And even in the areas in which we have made progress, we are now encountering steady erosion, as evidenced by the U.S. Supreme Court's invalidation of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act this year.

Given these lingering challenges, some of the most prescient words spoken at the 1963 march were perhaps not captured in the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s celebrated, hopeful and often quoted "I Have a Dream" speech, but in the words of another key organizer of the march, A. Philip Randolph.

"We have no future in a society in which 6 million black and white people are unemployed and millions more live in poverty. Nor is the goal of our civil rights revolution merely the passage of civil rights legislation," Mr. Randolph said in his speech.

"Yes, we want all public accommodations open to all citizens, but those accommodations will mean little to those who cannot afford them. Yes, we want a Fair Employment Practice Act, but what good will it do if profit-geared automation destroys the jobs of millions of workers, black and white?"

Add to "profit-geared automation" the outsourcing of jobs overseas, the proclivity now to create wealth through financial instruments rather than job creation, and Mr. Randolph could well be commenting on today's economic reality.

Mr. Randolph was also wise to see at the time that while color was a deciding factor in the measure of one's economic opportunities in this country, poverty, which is no respecter of color, was just as deadly in restricting economic opportunities.

Today, for example, 50 years after the March on Washington, some 49 million Americans, including 16.2 million children, are struggling to feed themselves.

In his speech, Mr. Randolph noted that the March on Washington was not "the climax of our struggle, but a new beginning not only for the Negro but for all Americans who thirst for freedom and a better life."

But in truth, many have come to regard those years as the climax of the country's civil rights struggle, which is why instead of marching on Washington we perhaps should nationalize the "Moral Monday" campaign currently being waged in North Carolina.

Since April, hundreds of North Carolinians have been gathering just about every Monday in Raleigh to voice their opposition to the state's restrictive voter ID laws and crippling cuts to a host of social benefits, including cuts in unemployment benefits and health care and education spending.

If Washington in 1963 was the ideal theater in which to launch the moral revolution, today the battle is best fought where the politicians who believe the American Dream is grandfathered to a select few get their start — your own backyard.